Unified communications represents an important component of productivity in contemporary business culture, and its success from company to company can serve as a bellwether indicator of the company's overall management success. An essential feature behind unified communications is the ability to have a single way for reaching an employee. Thus, in a fully configured unified communications environment, all messages to an employee, regardless of the format of their origin (e.g., e-mail) will reach the employee at the earliest possible moment via another format (e.g., SMS) if necessary.
One crucial backbone for unified communications arises from the ability to customize user experiences across all user groups. Another key backbone for unified communications is the ease with which users may utilize the functions and features of their communications equipment and systems.
Apart from the unified communications paradigm that has become so important in business culture, considerations such as customization and enhanced maintenance and maintainability also predominate in conventional consumer applications of communications technologies.
One aspect behind the ease of customers, both business and consumer customers, to utilize the full extent of their communications equipment arises from the ability to customize inter-operating devices to each other. So, for example, customizing a headset for maximum application with a given mobile telephone handset. Of course, this problem does not limit itself to mobile telephones alone and includes a larger class of devices that may connect to a wireless headset, including but not limited to personal computers.
To further support their products in achieving these aims, headset manufacturers often desire to provide extra features to users beyond those that shipped with the headset. Unfortunately, in many instances, the process for customizing a given headset for operation with any number of possible communication devices has proven too daunting and/or too resource intensive for manufacturers.
For example, it is typically not practical to include in a headset's firmware information about all the possible devices to which the headset might possibly be connected in order to customize the connection between the headset and each one of those given devices should such a connection occur. Of course, some headsets may be customizable for a given customer (e.g., a mobile carrier), but this solution is typically possible only because the varieties of mobile telephones offered by any given mobile carrier tend to be finite. Providing extra features for a theoretically unlimited set of headsets connected to a theoretically unlimited set of communications devices is a significantly more complicated problem.
Even a matter as seemingly simple as providing a customized headset icon for a mobile phone's device display can become a complicated logistical effort. One possible solution requires the headset somehow to transmit an image to the mobile handset when it connects, but there are numerous technical problems involved in this. Images tend to be large, requiring large amounts of memory in the headset, and there is some cost in transmitting the image from the headset to the phone. If the headset stored the icon, then it might well need a warehouse of icons in a variety of sizes plus logic for determining which icon was the appropriate one for a given communication device's display. In addition, the headset would need to have a common communication mechanism with the communication device in order to download the icon. Headsets do not conventionally come with much internal storage or the ability to carry out much complex logic. While headsets and handsets do communicate voice and some command information, the ability to conduct non-standard communications is often severely constrained.
Headsets could be sold with memory devices, such as CDs, but doing this would increase the cost of the headset. In addition, if the CDs were stored for any length of time, then new models of mobile phones would likely be released for which the CD contained no information. Furthermore, many customers do not like having to explicitly customize their headsets to work with a given communication device. For example, if the headset shipped with a CD, then for many communication devices, the user would still need to tether the communication device to a personal computer in order to read the CD so that it could instruct the handset in how to personalize the headset's display on the handset's device display. Many users might consider this solution to be more of a headache than a help.
The interoperability problems described above extend far beyond the display of simple icons representing a given headset. More significantly, the interoperability problem also pertains to the installation of new and updated drivers and new and updated application software.
More significantly with software and drivers than with the selection of an icon, there is always the risk the user will install the wrong driver or the wrong application—or that the user will never install either one. Users may find the process too complex and too cumbersome and simply never attempt anything at all.
Even worse, because of the danger of making the user's experience difficult and complex, tarnishing the manufacturer's products, some manufacturers foreswear the improvement of their fielded products and simply make no or few efforts to improve their fielded product base. In short, once these products have left the factory, they are considered complete and never updated.
As discussed above, attempts to solve this problem in the prior art have tended to be either overly complicated, overly expensive, or both. The provision of additional capabilities in the headsets for customization has generally not been considered an economically viable solution, and this solution is also not easily amenable to post-manufacturing updates. While provisioning the headset with a separate CD may be somewhat more economical, this solution can be fairly cumbersome and is also not readily amendable to post-manufacturing updates. Thus, while these solutions are somewhat workable, they produce far from the desired results and cannot possibly be considered robust.
Other solutions have proven equally inadequate or inappropriate. A simple and robust solution is called for in order to make unified communications more successful and ubiquitous, and to improve the interoperability and customization available in consumer devices.